Grievances, opportunities, or resources? Explaining far-right protest mobilisation in Europe

What explains far-right protest mobilisation? After decades of growing electoral support and policy influence, the far right is experiencing a sharp increase in grassroots mobilisation. Still, scholars of social movements and political parties have devoted little attention to the comparative study of the determinants of far-right protest in Europe. The article bridges previous research on the far right and social movements to advance hypotheses on the drivers of far-right protest mobilisation based on grievances, opportunities, and resource mobilisation models. We use an original dataset combining novel data on 4,845 far-right protest events in 11 East and West European countries (2008-2018), with existing measures accounting for the (political, economic, and cultural) context of mobilisation. We find that classical approaches to collective action and party politics can be effectively applied to the far right. Cultural grievances, notably concerns about immigration, as well as the availability of institutional access points in contexts characterised by divided government unambiguously increase far-right protest. At the same time, far-right mobilisation also rests on the organisational resources available to protest groups, i.e. the network in which they are embedded, the visibility they enjoy in the media, and the availability of elected officials. These findings have important implications for the understanding of far-right success in advanced democracies. They show that far right mobilisation in the protest arena not only rests on favourable circumstances, but also on whether or not far-right actors can profit from them. More broadly, this study helps connecting party politics and social movement research to understand transformations in the modes of political contestation, reinstating the role of research on the far right in the broader fields of political sociology and comparative politics.